Some known conventional baseball games have specifications that allow substitutions of player characters participating in a game. With a baseball game according to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-28217, in a case where a game player wishes to substitute a player character such as by using a pinch hitter for a next batter, the game player first presses a “time-out” button on a screen showing a game in progress. As a result, a transition is made from the game-in-progress screen to a bird's-eye view screen showing only enlarged close-ups of a plurality of players that are substitution objects (see FIG. 7 and FIG. 8 in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-28217. The game player then selects and decides a player character (in this case, a batter) that the game player wishes to use as a substitute from the players shown in the bird's-eye view screen. Subsequently, by returning to the game screen, the game can be restarted from a state where the substitution with the pinch hitter has been made.
However, with the player substitution method disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-28217 described above, displaying substitution candidate players requires a screen transition step in which the game-in-progress screen is first switched to another screen, a player is then selected and decided, and the original screen is subsequently restored. Therefore, there are problems in that in addition to a substitution requiring a time-consuming operation, a substitution causes a game-in-progress screen to be temporarily switched to a completely different screen and gives an impression that a flow of the game has been abruptly disrupted.